...some have had as hard a time as the US is, others don't because there is still a respect for people in this profession, which has long since been lost in this country.
The only thing I wish is that people would have more respect for the vast majority of teachers in this country - the ones like me who work our butts off so that every kid we come in contact with leaves our room better educated, more mature, and wiser than when they entered. (Not to mention the amount of food, clothing and supplies we hand out each year to kids in need.)
I have a lot of respect for teachers who work hard and know their subject matter. I wish that more people with graduate-level degrees in physics or math or whatever (outside of education degrees) went into teaching.
I can see some of the points that people make here. I also accept that kids may like teachers who go easy on them. I totally understand how frustrating the Christmas tree thing could be.
At the same time, though, I can't fully accept complaints about the unfairness being judged on student performance. The whole point of teaching is to impart knowledge --- usually to kids. This fact makes it perfectly reasonable to judge a teacher by how much her students have learned. Maybe it shouldn't be 100% of a performance evaluation, but learning should count for a lot.
Employees EVERYWHERE are judged on how well they perform the duties of their jobs. For a teacher, the single most important duty is to impart knowledge, again, making it not just reasonable, but
essential to judge on what the kids have learned. Try to see this from the taxpayer's and the employer's point of view: when teachers resist being evaluated on what they're paid to do, it's reasonable to start wondering why --- especially when (public school) teachers as a group do so poorly on the SAT, the GRE, and state certification exams. If some people here are tired of lack of respect for teachers, I'm tired of this critically important fact being ignored or explained away.
And honestly, by denying that cognitive ability differs and forcing lockstep pacing, the education establishment has made part of this mess itself. If slower learners were allowed to work at a pace that suited them and take appropriate tests, they'd probably end up doing a lot better on the tests. Yes, I know NCLB is a disaster in that regard. But NCLB exacerbated a lot of these problems. It didn't create them.
Oh, and managers
are judged on the performance of the people they manage. Being a line manager means that you accept responsibility for leading people and ensuring that they get stuff done on time. Yes, some people just won't work, just like some students will Christmas-tree a Scantron form. But it's not like this is a completely either-or situation. Creativity could help a bit. For example, we could cut out a certain percentage of the bottom performers and a certain percentage of the top performers on high-stakes tests (if the Christmas trees go, so should the HG+ kids who learned that stuff themselves three years ago). This would be akin to scoring at event like Olympic skating.
